Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Setting the Mood for Zombies

Tomorrow night I start playing in a War of the Dead Savage Worlds game. I'm really looking forward to it, in part because I haven't had a player outlet since my Pathfinder burnout kept me from wanting to continue on in my friend's Shackled City campaign.

After making up what I hope is a good character for the genre (and I have to say, I spent more time on the character background than on the stats, which is a plus for me), I decided that tonight would be a great night to watch a zombie flick and get in the proper mind set for the campaign.

(See what I did there. Up there . . . that is not the film that I watched)

What follows is a lesson in doing research before one "assumes" anything based on copy text. I called up some zombie flicks on Netflix, and saw the 2008 version of Day of the Dead listed as being available for streaming. Hey, it even says its based on Romero's classic, and it has Ving Rhames. Wait . . . and Mena Suvari? Eh, whatever, let's watch this thing.

Let me skip ahead a bit here . . . after the movie I read the reviews (you would think that I would have done that the other way, but, hey, sometimes you have to play celluloid roulette). I also Googled the 2008 movie. Turns out, a movie studio owns the name of Romero's #3 Zombie movie, and decided it would be fun to take the script, run it through a paper shredder, then tape together three random parts from the original film to use in this one.

As a result, we have a character with the same name, a domesticated zombie, and an underground military base. We also have Ving Rhames doing his best three stooges impression after becoming a zombie. Seriously, if you ever wanted to know what Curly would look like if he were a zombie, and black, this movie has it!

This movie also has fast zombies. Not zombies that can run. Zombies that move so fast that the only way to emulate their fast movement is to momentarily speed the film up. Thankfully, these zombies had the previously unknown weakness that caused them to suddenly become uncoordinated stiff zombies as soon as they pick up guns. Honestly, I haven't seen such unintentionally amusing gunplay since they gave Dick Cheney that hunting show.*

The movie did really scare me at one point, however. For a brief moment I pictured the armed forces being populated with people like Mena Suvari and Nick Cannon. Still, I really can't blame anyone but myself, given that I didn't want to spend the 30 seconds it would have taken to look up stupid film online.

I hope I don't run into any of those wall crawling ninja zombies tomorrow night.

So, why isn't the Walking Dead streaming anywhere right now?

*Dick Chaney didn't really get a hunting show. I make things up. I'm a bad person.

On one hand, I have seen it, on the other hand, it's never inappropriate to be reminded of the travesty that is Rob Liefeld's career.

And number 18 has always been a personal favorite of mine.

I kind of picture Image Comics executive meetings involved all of the "old timers" talking about how awesome it was back in the day, and Kirkman nodding, passing out their meds, and going back to work.